Monday, November 14, 2011

Walking Into Prehistory

France is a hiker's paradise. It's big
enough to have enormous variety in terrain and climate*, so there're
plenty of choices. It's full of parks and protected areas of all
sizes. And it has tens of thousands of miles of trails, from short
local loops to long-distance paths across regions or even the whole
country, all of them marked and maintained and many of them
interconnected. You can almost-literally walk anywhere. There's a
company that publishes guides to all of these trails, a set
describing short hikes and another for planning trips along the long
trails (or sections of the really long ones), both organized geographically. The
guides fill an entire section of shelves in bookstores. It's
frustratingly difficult, if not impossible, to find useful free
information, but the guides are fantastic. They break down each leg
of the trail with directions, give distances and time estimates,
point out sights along the way and where to find hotels, food, bus
stations, etc., and have tons of short side articles about the towns, landmarks,
and local culture along the routes.

I bought two of them at the beginning
of the Toussaint vacances: a guide to day hiking in the Parc naturel
regional d'Armorique, which is only a short distance away from Brest,
and a guide to the Morbihan (southern Brittany) section of the GR
(grande randonnée) 34, which follows much of the coast of Brittany.

After marking all of the
interesting-looking possibilities in the guide to the Parc naturel
regional, I starting looking into how to get to their locations. It
was at that point that I began discovering the limitations of the
French bus systems. (See my earlier post about transportation.) Forced to concede that I was not going to be able
to access some of the places I most wanted to and that others were
going to require a lot of additional walking, probably along roads
rather than walking paths, from the nearest town with a bus stop, not
to mention the hassles of timing any trip to correspond to the
severely limited bus schedules, I gave up and turned to the other
book to plan a trip to Carnac. There I discovered still more
transportation issues (though at least not the kind where I simply
couldn't get where I wanted to go) and the issue of nonexistent
budget accommodations. After attempting multiple itineraries, I
eventually managed to settle on one that was a lot more limited in
scope than I'd wanted, but was relatively straightforward in terms of
transportation and involved only one overnight stay, in a reasonably
priced (but definitely not cheap) hotel in the town of Carnac.

Here's how it worked: I got up in the
dark on Wednesday morning of that week and left, still in the dark, a
few minutes after six a.m. I actually really like being out that
early, when I have a good reason to be. Everything is still and quiet and you can feel that you're
right on the cusp of a brand-new day. And when you've just gotten up
at that hour, as opposed to not yet having gone to bed (probably the
more common reason I'd be awake two hours before dawn), the darkness
and the empty streets are thrilling instead of threatening.

I took a seven o'clock bus, the first
of the day, to Quimper, where I caught a train to Auray, the first
train station beyond my ultimate destination. (Yes, I could have
taken the train all the way from Brest, but I'd also have paid a lot
more for it.) Then I started backtracking, by taking a bus a few
kilometers back towards Carnac and getting off in a seaside town
called Trinité-sur-Mer, 10 km and 2.5 hours, according to my
guidebook, from Carnac by foot. And there I started walking.

My original lofty goals for the trip
had involved a lot more walking from place to place and a lot less
waiting for buses, but with all of the various time constraints I was
facing I unfortunately had to prioritize my destinations over my
journeys. I was determined to see the alignments at Carnac and get to
the town of Erdeven the next day with enough time to do an
interesting loop hike there, and to accomplish both of those I had to
give up on spending the majority of the trip on the ground. But I was
still determined to arrive at Carnac on foot.

The stretch of the trail from Trinité
to Carnac is probably not the most interesting one, although some of
it is very beautiful. Leaving Trinite, the shoreline was rocky and I
watched people gathering shellfish, obviously taking advantage of the
beautiful weather and, in some cases, of the fact that the kids
didn't have to go to school. The small rocks gave way to boulders,
and I stopped for lunch on a windy headland looking out from the tip
of the point. Someone had been there before me and gathered up enough
little white rocks to build a tiny model dolmen** surrounded by a
little stone circle—which I thought was way cooler than a sand
castle.

After rounding the point, the rocks
thin out suddenly and the trail crosses over sand dunes and though a
stretch of pine forest before eventually hitting a road, which
crosses a lovely marsh and runs alongside a couple of nice beaches,
but which makes for a long, dull walk on a sidewalk instead of in
nature.

I should point out that the hiking
guide was actually written for someone going in the opposite
direction, so not only was I trying to decipher directions in French,
I was trying to do it backwards, which would have been confusing even
if they were in English. Fortunately, most of the trail was well
marked or unmistakable or both, but I did have a couple of moments of uncertainty. I also eventually lost it entirely somewhere on the
outskirts of Carnac, but since at that point I was on my way into
town anyway, I just kept walking instead of going back to try to find
the official route.

I should also point out that the French
like to close up shop (and that's any imaginable kind of shop, along
with banks, post offices, assorted other kinds of offices, museums,
and anything else you can think of) for a couple of hours in the
early afternoon. The French like their long lunches, and they take
their not-having-to-work time very seriously, and it's all very
frustrating to an American who's accustomed to being able to get
stuff done in the middle of the day. Anyway, I arrived in Carnac
around 1:30, which is exactly the wrong time of day to be able to do
anything in France other than eat lunch or have a drink. Especially
in a small town.

So I walked around for a bit just to
see what might be interesting to go back to later, and then I sat
outside the tourism office waiting for it to reopen, which turned out
to be a waste of time (because I didn't find anything very useful
there, not because it never reopened). Then I went to find my hotel,
where I found the door locked even though I was well after the 2 pm
check-in time (oh, France...), so I grudgingly continued carrying my
backpack with me as I headed up the road towards the alignments,
which are just north of town. In fact, they turned out to be closer
than I thought—maybe a ten minute walk from my hotel.

And they're awesome, of course. I took
far too many pictures, but else can you do? There is no photograph
man could take that would encompass the scale of the place, but you
have to try. And try. And try.

The stones vary in size from up to
about my waist to several times taller than me, and they seem to get
gradually larger from one end of the alignments to the other. The
rows are very straight and all completely parallel. And they go on
and on, as far as the eye can see. There are actually several
different sets, and I only visited one and still couldn't believe the
enormity of it. I just stood in the middle of the field and stared
for the longest time.

And yes—I did just say “the middle
of the field”. Because in the off-season, when the crowds are less,
you don't have to pay for a guided tour to be allowed to go in among
the stones. They just open the gate, and you're free to wander as you
please.

When I couldn't look anymore, I went back to my hotel and then back into town. Carnac is divided into two parts, the town proper and the beachfront town a short distance away. (Archaeology and the beach all in one spot--what more could anyone want?) The beach had come to life since my stop in the afternoon, and felt just like an American boardwalk in the summer, which for me was both weird and really cool. I walked around watching families and looking at the arcades and carnival rides and peeking into tacky souvenir shops, and eventually succombed to the lure of an awe-inspiring snack stand where I bought a waffle covered in salty caramel (a Breton speciality) and white chocolate, which I ate on a bench overlooking the ominously rough ocean, watching the crowds that hadn't already hit the town packing up their cars.

From the Neolithic to the epitome of modern tourism in less than two hours and no more than a few kilometers. France, my friends, is an interesting place.

Also, one of the fun facts I learned this past weekend is that the French for "time machine" is "machine à explorer le temps". I like that, but it seems unnecessarily complicated, if you ask me.

Like many things in France.

* France has four different climate zones, if I remember correctly. The US, by comparison, has about ten or eleven. That's not exactly a proportional difference considering France could fit into the US almost 15 times. (Yes, I did the math.) You could easily hit several different climates in France in the space of a couple of days, which would be considerably more difficult in the US.
** A prehistoric stone tomb.

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This started out as my international travel blog, and I used it to document (however incompletely and imperfectly) my month at an archaeological field school near San Ignacio, Belize, the four months I spent as a university student in Cork, Ireland, and my adventures living and working as an English language TA in Brest, France during the 2011-2012 school year. I've also posted occasionally between stints abroad, mostly about spiritual/metaphorical journeys or about plans and dreams for future travel. The goal now is to start blogging more regularly, about those things, my smaller-scale travels here in the U.S., and hopefully, someday, some more visits to other countries... So let's see how this goes.

The Enigmatic Twofold Explanation For The Blog Title:

Eldorado, by Edgar Allen Poe"El Dorado is also sometimes used as a metaphor to represent an ultimate prize or "Holy Grail" that one might spend one's life seeking. It could represent true love, heaven, happiness, or success. It is used sometimes as a figure of speech to represent something much sought after that may not even exist, or, at least, may not ever be found." — Wikipedia

About Me

I am 22 years old and a recent graduate of Oberlin College, where I probably learned more about gender, food, Judaism, and liberal politics than about anything I was formally studying. Things I did formally study include anthropology and history, but I also dream of writing novels and publishing my poetry... along with having a singing career, acting onstage, and/or becoming a respected designer of theatrical costumes. Oh well. Right now I'm killing time for a few years before applying to graduate school in archaeology.

"When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.